Six to six.
The arena came apart. The red side, the small red side, the Cutler Springs side, had only been forty people all day, maybe fifty, but now it seemed like everyone who wasn't wearing green and white was on their feet. Rosie was jumping up and down on her seat with her three fingers in the air. The clock said fifty-two seconds.
Castellanos escaped with thirty-one seconds left. She did it the way she did everything, smoothly, as if it had already happened and she was just catching up to it, and stood up and turned and faced Dani with her hands out. Seven to six, Castellanos.
Thirty seconds. Twenty-five. The two girls circled. Castellanos kept her distance, snapping at Dani's hands, backing toward the edge of the mat. She didn't need to score. She just needed to wait. Twenty seconds. The crowd was counting down with the clock now, the green-and-white half of it, a roar that rose with every number. Fifteen. Twelve. Dani reached and Castellanos slapped her hand away. Ten. Dani reached again, high, for the head, and Castellanos's hands came up to block it—
—and Dani was gone. Under. Low. Her right hand on the back of Castellanos's ankle, her left at the knee, her head driving into the hip. Six seconds. Five. Castellanos sprawled. Four. Dani held on. Three. Dani turned the corner, came up behind her, drove her down onto the gold mat with both arms locked around her waist—
Two.
The referee's arm came up. Three fingers.
One.
The horn.
Nine to seven.
Tom didn't remember sitting down. He didn't remember Rosie climbing into his lap. He only remembered that at some point he was sitting in the last row of the Tacoma Dome with his face wet and his younger daughter's arms around his neck, and that far below them, under the white lights, on a gold mat the size of a postage stamp, a girl in a red singlet was standing with her hand raised in the referee's grip and her headgear pushed back, and she wasn't looking at the referee, or at her coach, or at the screaming crowd.
She was looking at the top row.
* * *
It took them a long time to get back down. People kept stopping Tom on the stairs, and he kept saying thank you without really knowing what he was saying. Down on the floor, the officials were setting up a podium beside the platform for the medal ceremonies. They'd do all the weights at the end, someone told him. Another hour. He could wait another hour. He thought he could probably wait the rest of his life.